Friday, July 26, 2013

This cover of one of the best songs of the 80's (and there are few), the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)," is done by a guy named Ryan O'Neal whose stage name is Sleeping At Last. There's something about quirky, unusual covers that can give life to great songs with a bit of age on them. This song, still a great one in its original form, is nearly as perfect as the first time the Proclaimers played it.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Editor's Note: The following op-ed appears here with the permission of its author. It was submitted to the Idaho State Journal for print.

SCOTUS ON DOMA: The Real Messageby Leonard Hitchcock

The Supreme Court’s decision
regarding the Defense of Marriage Act contains two lines of argumentation that
are essentially incompatible.The
first is that DOMA is unconstitutional because it violates a state’s right to
determine its own definition of what constitutes a marital relationship; the
second is that DOMA is unconstitutional because it violates a citizen’s Fifth
and Fourteenth Amendment rights to liberty and equal treatment under the law.

The first argument
unfolds in the following way [all quotations are from the majority opinion of
the court, written by Justice Kennedy]: “The
definition of marriage is the foundation of the State’s broader authority to
regulate the subject of domestic relations with respect to the protection of offspring,
property interests, and the enforcement of marital responsibilities.” Creating
that definition “has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of
the States.”

It is true that the
federal government has occasionally intervened in states’ regulation of
domestic relations.Congress
determined, for example, that marriages “entered into for the purpose of
procuring an alien’s admission [to the United States] as an immigrant will not
qualify the noncitizen for that status, even if the noncitizen’s marriage is
valid and proper for state-law purposes.” It also decided that, in the computation
of social security benefits “common-law marriages also should be recognized,
regardless of any particular State’s view on these relationships.”

But these
interventions involved discrete federal programs and were tailored to do no
more than make the operation of those programs efficient and fair.DOMA was very different.DOMA was not enacted to implement a
specific government program, and it was “applicable to over 1,000 federal
statutes and the whole realm of federal regulations.”Moreover, because some states had decided to recognize
same-sex marriages, DOMA had “rejected the long established precept that the
incidents, benefits, and obligations of marriage are uniform for all married
couples within each State, though they may vary… from one State to the next.”In other words, DOMA had usurped those
states’ rightful authority and created a category of couples whose marriages,
though recognized by the state, were nullified by federal law.In so doing, DOMA violated the
Constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government.

The second line of
argument focuses on the intent of DOMA and its effects upon the rights of
individuals, rather than the rights of states. The discriminatory intent of DOMA,
according to the court, was “to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and
so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages” and “to ensure that if
any State decides to recognize same-sex marriages, those unions will be treated
as second-class marriages for purposes of federal law.”DOMA resulted from a “congressional
desire to harm a politically unpopular group,” and therefore was clearly
“motived by an improper animusor
purpose.”

The law sought “ to
impose restrictions and disabilities” upon a state-defined class of persons”
and “ the resulting injury and indignity [was] a deprivation of an essential
part of the liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment.”The effects of DOMA involved a wide
range of practical negative consequences, in areas such as federal health care
programs, social security, taxation, and bankruptcy law. It also “divested
same-sex couples of the duties and responsibilities that are an essential part
of married life and that they in most cases would be honored to accept were
DOMA not in force,” and it affected the children of same-sex couples, making it
“even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness
of theirown family and its concord with other
families in their community and in their daily lives.”

In sum, the Court concluded
that “DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the liberty of the person
protected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,” a liberty that “contains
within it the prohibition against denying to any person the equal protection of
the laws.”

In the opinion’s
narrative, the two lines of argumentation I’ve delineated are intertwined.Its censures of DOMA’s Fifth Amendment violations
usually presuppose the context of the case actually before the court, i.e. a
gay married couple in a state that permits same-sex marriage.And the final sentence of the opinion
insists that the court’s decision should be understood as applying only to such
persons.

But Justice Scalia,
in his dissenting opinion, quite correctly points out that all of the criticisms
contained in what I have called the second line of argument would apply not
just to DOMA, but to state laws and constitutions that prohibit same-sex
marriage. Hence an assumption of
the first line of argument -- that whether or not a state decides to permit
same-sex marriage is of no constitutional concern – is obviously false.What the court has actually made quite
clear is that if and when a legal challenge to a state law (or constitution)
banning same-sex marriage reaches the Supreme Court, that challenge will be
warmly received.It is not
coincidental that immediately after the DOMA decision, the ACLU in Pennsylvania
brought suit against that state’s law against same-sex marriage. The
handwriting is on the wall.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Editor's Note: There seems no more fitting time than now to share a portion of Robert F. Kennedy's speech from April 5th, 1968, just hours following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It speaks to the progress we've yet to make in this country and the steps we can take today. You can read the full speech here.

"Whenever any American's life is taken by another American
unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the
defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion,
in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear
at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily
woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"'Among free men,' said Abraham Lincoln, 'there can be no successful
appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are
sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.'

"Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our
common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept
newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify
killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We
make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons
and ammunition they desire.

"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too
often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the
shattered dreams of others" [...]

"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly
destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence
of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the
violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men
because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of
a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in
the winter.

"This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to
stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us
all."

"...When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you
teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the
policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you
threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to
confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not
with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered."

"...Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too
great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we
cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

"But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live
with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment
of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out
their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and
fulfillment they can.

"Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can
begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at
those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little
harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts
brothers and countrymen once again."

About Me

I am an independent historian, a native Idahoan, an avid reader, a lifelong fan of baseball, and a Democrat. The Political Game offers progressive perspectives on current events, Idaho history & politics, and the political world President Kennedy once referred to as a "great chess game."